The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

Reddit.tv, Reddit All reach out to casual social news readers

April 29, 2009 | 12:37
pm

Social news website Reddit isn't the prettiest on the Net. It's Digg, Reddit's more popular competitor, that's nominated for a Webby award for best design. But Reddit's bare-bones interface has grown a loyal following among tech geeks and computer programmers.

Still, its home page, cluttered with blocks of text and buttons, can turn off new users and isn't conducive to multimedia content. Make way for Reddit.tv and Reddit All.

Reddit.tv, which launched today, aggregates all of the Web videos from Reddit.com into a clean, ad-free (at least for now) landing page that has an emphasis first and foremost on watching video. You can easily jump from clip to clip with the big "next video" button.

But the new product is clearly not geared toward Reddit's opinionated users, who are constantly ...

... voting and commenting on content. In order to use those features, Reddit.tv directs users back to the main site.

Another new service, Reddit All, brings a cleaner design to the site's content. A photo stream at the top of the page pulls the most popular images. Below that, headlines from the most-read categories are aggregated in a three-column format similar to iGoogle or AllTop.

Like Reddit.tv, Reddit All lacks some key functionality of the main site. Voting on stories and commenting takes place on Reddit.com. But the targeted audience -- casual users -- probably won't mind, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in an instant message.

The real obstacle is going to be directing those users to the two offshoots. Reddit currently doesn't promote these products on its main page. But Ohanian says Reddit will give the new services more attention in an upcoming redesign to the main site, which will add a slew of new features.